On the Road to the Stars – Bertalan Farkas, the First Hungarian Cosmonaut

“Cosmonaut is a human whose activity takes place in extraordinary conditions […] often nearing the limit of tolerance.” (Yuri Gagarin)

Bertalan Farkas was born in Gyulaháza, Hungary in 1949. His father was a shoemaker. He pursued his studies at a vocational secondary school in Kisvárda, and took to flying gliders at the Nyíregyháza club of the Hungarian Homeland Defense Alliance.

At the age of seventeen, he decided to choose aviation as a lifetime career path, and applied for admission to the Kilián György AviationTechnical College. After two years of successful studies, he went to the Soviet Union to continue his flying training there. He was commissioned as lieutenant in 1972 and transferred to a tactical fighter squadron of the Hungarian air force, where he flew supersonic combat aircraft.
His talent, diligence and love of the vocation helped him to cope with all difficulties. In the rank of captain, together with several of his comrades, he volunteered for cosmonaut candidate training. On 20 March 1978, he started to prepare for accomplishing the most difficult and greatest mission of his life at the cosmonaut training centre in Star City. As researcher-cosmonaut of the Interkosmos program, he lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Soyuz-36 spacecraft on 26 May 1980, to become the first Hungarian in space.